Can Putin Bomb His Way Out of Sanctions?
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Putin has turned a bombing campaign into new diplomatic leverage that can be deployed against sanctions.
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Venezuela: A Dictatorship Masquerading as a Democracy
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Democracy is not defined by what happens on Election Day, but rather by how the government behaves in between elections.
Read MoreHuman nature against Mother Nature
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
Lately, Mother Nature seems to be trying to get our attention. Its signals are increasingly loud, strident and hard to miss. Some have been lethal. 2015 is poised to become the hottest year on record. Last October, Hurricane Patricia, the strongest ever recorded by meteorologists, produced record winds that reached 200 miles per hour. Average temperatures in the Artic have been increasing twice as fast as temperatures in the rest of the planet. This contributes to the thawing of the icecovered polar surface. Every 10 years, this ice cover shrinks by 9%. Scientists expect that polar thawing will raise sea levels to such a point that the populations of many highly urbanized coastal areas will be forced to move to higher ground.
Read MoreAfter Paris: War Is Not What It Used to Be
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Huffington Post
They used to be between tribes. Or city-states. Or one empire against another. Or between countries. Today, who wages war?
Read MoreThe World in Quotation Marks
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
After visiting Argentina in the 1970s, the novelist V.S. Naipaul reflected on the “colonial mimicry” of Buenos Aires. “Within the imported metropolis there is the structure of a developed society. But men can often appear to be mimicking their functions,” he wrote. “So many words have acquired lesser meanings in Argentina: general, artist, journalist, historian, professor, university, director, executive, industrialist, aristocrat, library, museum, zoo: so many words seem to need inverted commas.”
Read MoreThe Coming Turmoil in Latin America
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Latin America has gone from a period of prosperity to a period of peril. Between 2004 and 2013, the region experienced extraordinary economic growth and social progress. Demand—mostly from Asia—for the commodities that constitute the region’s main exports increased sharply, pushing up both the prices of those exports and the volumes traded. Revenues from this trade, in turn, stimulated regional economies and helped fill governments’ coffers. This unprecedented demand coincided with a period of very low interest rates, abundant credit, and surging foreign investment flows into Latin America.
Read MoreWhat Pope Francis and Xi Jinping Have in Common
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Pope Francis and Chinese President Xi Jinping are, in many ways, worlds apart. One is the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics (over 40 percent of whom reside in Latin America) and the other presides over 1.4 billion Chinese. Pope Francis is a religious leader and Xi Jinping is a political one.
Read MoreThe Charades of Donald Trump and Alexis Tsipras
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Donald Trump and Alexis Tsipras couldn’t be more different. The sexagenarian Trump is an unabashed capitalist while the 40-year-old Greek prime minister joined the Communist Party as a teenager and since 2009 has led the radical-left Syriza party. The ostentatious American parades his multiple mansions and his fortune, which Forbes had the temerity to value at a meager $4 billion despite Trump’s claims that it “is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” Tsipras, an engineer who has spent most of his life as a political activist, lives in a modest apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Athens. The prime minister rarely wears a tie, whereas the Donald J. Trump Collection offers “the pinnacle of style and prestige in the form of men’s suits, dress shirts, cuff links, neckwear, belts, eyewear, and more.” During political rallies, Trump likes to extol wealth while Tsipras denounces the growing gap between rich and poor.
Read MoreThe Clash Within Civilizations
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Friday, June 26 was a day of terror. In Tunisia, a gunman killed 38 tourists, nearly all of them European, at a beach resort. In Kuwait, a suicide bomber murdered 27 people at a Shiite mosque. In France, an assailant decapitated his boss and attempted to blow up a chemical plant. ISIS claimed responsibility for the first two attacks; the perpetrator of the third appears to have ties to radical Islamist groups.
Read MoreTrue or false: The seven most common ideas
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
Will OPEC disappear? Has the shale boom inflicted a mortal wound? Here is a breakdown of seven big arguments about the organization’s future.
Read MoreWhy Cyber War Is Dangerous for Democracies
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
This month, two years after his massive leak of NSA documents detailing U.S. surveillance programs, Edward Snowden published an op-ed in The New York Times celebrating his accomplishments. The “power of an informed public,” he wrote, had forced the U.S. government to scrap its bulk collection of phone records. Moreover, he noted, “Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed new restrictions on future activities.” He concluded by asserting that “We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason.”
Read MoreWhat FIFA and the Berlin Philharmonic Reveal About Power
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Sepp Blatter has been called the “most powerful man in sports.” But until recently, the nature—and durability—of that power was poorly understood. This past week, it was striking to watch Blatter, the long-serving strongman at FIFA, run the global soccer organization and get reelected to a fifth presidential term as if nothing had happened—as if the lieutenants surrounding him hadn’t just been accused of corruption and arrested by Swiss and American authorities, the latest in a series of scandals and corruption allegations that had tarnished the federation’s reputation for years. Ahead of easily winning the contest for FIFA’s highest office on Friday, Blatter said, “We don’t need revolutions but we always need evolutions. … I will fix FIFA.”
Read MoreAmerica’s Self-Inflicted Wounds
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Will the United States remain the most powerful country in the world? Many think not. Those who feel this way also tend to think that China’s ascent will lead to America’s decline. Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who is not a declinist, begins his new book Is the American Century Over? noting that “in recent years, polls showed that in 15 of 22 countries surveyed, most respondents said that China either will replace or has already replaced the United Sates as the world’s leading power.” Its giant landmass and billion-strong population, combined with rapid economic, social, and military progress over the last few decades, make China an obvious candidate to overtake the United States as the primary shaper of world affairs. But the attention in the United States to China and other foreign threats obscures an important fact: America’s diminishment as a world power may be driven as much by the fraying of its domestic politics and chronic institutional gridlock as by the rise of rivals abroad.
Read MoreEconomists Still Think Economics Is the Best
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
Ten years ago, a survey published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that 77 percent of the doctoral candidates in the leading American economics programs agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "economics is the most scientific of the social sciences."
Read MoreThe Lagarde Consensus
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
The 1990s was the era of the Washington Consensus—a suite of reforms, including privatization and open trade, that the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and U.S. Treasury Department urged governments around the world to adopt for their economies to prosper. That consensus has vanished with financial crashes in countries such as Mexico and Russia, the 2008 financial crisis, and the general disappearance of consensus in this politically fractured world.
Read MoreThe Summit of Lies
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
As heads of state gather this week in Panama for the Summit of the Americas, expect a celebration, a confrontation, and lots of lies.
Read MoreThe Hidden Effects of Cheap Oil
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / The Atlantic
What do Russia, Exxon Mobil, and ISIS have in common? Not much, except that they’re all grappling with an inconvenient but incontrovertible truth: a sudden, significant, and prolonged shift in the price of oil changes the world.
Read MoreVladimir Putin’s Ebbing Power
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / Fortune
Until recently Vladimir Putin was customarily included in lists of the world’s most powerful people. Throughout a nearly 16-year reign, Putin’s brand of leadership—full of swagger, bare-chested photo ops, and tiger hunting—has brought him wide popularity at home and even grudging admiration abroad, a fact that was made clear by his selection as Time’s 2007 Person of the Year. “[He] makes a decision and he executes it—quickly. And then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani on Fox News last year. After Putin’s 2009 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the CEO of one of the world’s largest companies told me, “He is a thug, but we have no option other than to deal with him and his cronies. He is just too powerful.”
Read MoreThe consequences of the consequences of low oil prices
Angie G50
Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
Lower prices had a direct impact on exporting countries such as Russia and Venezuela. These impacts produced their own “second order” effects that are only just being felt. Many of these effects will be negative, but some will have positive results, as governments take the opportunity to initiate reforms.
Read MoreThe Anti-Information Age
Angie G50
Moisés Naím and Philip Bennett / The Atlantic
Two beliefs safely inhabit the canon of contemporary thinking about journalism. The first is that the Internet is the most powerful force disrupting the news media. The second is that the Internet and the communication and information tools it has spawned—like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook—are shifting power from governments to civil society and to individual bloggers, netizens, or citizen journalists.
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